Greetings Cloud Hashers!
It has been two weeks since our last newsletter and we apologize for the gap in our newsletters, the surge of customer requests hit us like a storm and we continue to focus our energies towards improving customer service and support, and have made a lot of progress in those areas since our last announcements but have a ways to go. We have an optimistic view on things, but we understand many of our customers have vented their frustrations in things not always happening as quickly as we'd all like. We understand your frustration and feel it as well, Bitcoin is a fast moving industry and a day can feel a lot longer and a week can seem like an eternity.
With that said, we are dedicated to this business 7 days a week and we believe our efforts will shine through to benefit our customers through better service, support and delivered hashing power as we refine our processes. We furthermore improved a number of features and fixed many bugs that challenged our model of deploying hashing power within 24-hours of contract purchase. This newsletter will be a bit lengthy, as it will address a number of customer support requests, features, fixes and changes that have taken place over the last two weeks. For those who have been working through those issues with us, we appreciate your communication and ongoing support.
July 25% Hashrate Bonuses: As a recap, all July customers received a 25% hashing power increase
to their hashing power as promised. This appeared on your Mining Pool dashboard page as a new contract for each of the orders you had in July, and would show up as a miner that is 25% the size of the contract it bonused.
Bitcoin Hits Record High: Since our last Newsletter, Bitcoin has hit a new record, surging past April 2013's previous mid $200 levels and reaching the mid 300's. This surge in Bitcoin's price and the global growing demand for Bitcoin as a currency has made Bitcoin mining more relevant than ever as one of the most effective means to earn and obtain Bitcoins. This was made evidently clear to us by the increasing number of requests for Business Contracts. We however have focused on existing customer issues and new consumer customer contracts as of late, delaying our response to new Business contract enquiries until we have satisfied the greater majority of questions and promises we set out to keep.
Revenue Reinvestment Program starts to rev upi the Hash engines
Starting thisweek, the 'RRP' program begun to allow customers to increase their hashing power through selecting a reinvestment percentage in the Mining Pool dashboard for their contract. This balance of coins generated will go into an earning pool for this customer, and then later their RRP balance will be used in December for the first increase to your overall hashing power at rate of approximately $25.00/gh based on our current calculations. The RRP increase will appear as a new contract in your dashboard once it goes live, so keep a lookout for the announcements prior to that.
Ongoing Developments and Accessing Your Contracts
A lot of development has been underway. A large button has been added to your
www.cloudhashing.com account which can be accessed once you login at
www.cloudhashing.com and click on "My Dashboard” section at the top of the page. The button to login to the Mining Pool once clicked will automatically log you into your account on
http://pool.cloudhashing.com so you can manage your contracts. If it's your first time, you'll be asked to create a username and enter an e-mail address. If another user already has your username, you'll need to try again. Should you experience errors with this, please contact us.
Important to note for customers is the following: If you are an existing customer or just purchased contracts and use the login button, you do not need to click register on the mining pool. This registration option is for creating new accounts for non Cloud Hashing customers who are interested in using the mining pool for their external hardware bitcoin mining. You can use your hardware inside of your account without ever needing register an account.
Managing your Contracts and Setting Up your Bitcoin Wallet Address
After you have clicked the login button and logged into the Mining Pool, you should see a link for "Profile Settings." This allows you to change your password and configure your wallet address where you will receive your bitcoin payouts generated from your contracts. You will also need to set your Automatic payout threshold, before any payouts will occur. This is the minimum amount of earnings you'll want to have before a payout is made. This field must be numeric, and can include decimals. An example for starters is 0.10
Answering Customer Questions and Making Improvements
Below are a few of the questions and answers we received the past two weeks from clients. We hope this helps many of you with similar questions and gives you insight into our progress as a company and effort towards customer support and service. We are striving to improve by bringing on both development and customer service staff and turning around bug reports into solutions faster.
1. New Contracts appearing on the mining pool after purchase
Our customers being able to immediately access their newly purchased contracts was a major perogative to us, and while this functionality worked in most cases, a few system bugs caused a handfull of new and existing customers to experience a delay in contracts showing up on the mining pool front-end. In many cases, these contracts were loaded in the back end but were not visibile, but in some cases they were missing and we have made a continual effort to fix these issues as quickly as we can.
2. Updating your Bitcoin Wallet on the Mining Pool
Some users have had issue updating their bitcoin wallet address in their settings. If your wallet address has updated properly, it should show your wallet in the form field for the bitcoin wallet address on your Profile Settings page on
http://pool.cloudhashing.com after you click the update changes button and refresh the page. Please submit a ticket if you are still having problems updating your wallet.
3. The Lock Wallet Feature
Many of you will see on the Mining Pool profile settings page a checkbox that says Lock Wallet. This feature is a security feature, which will permanently lock the wallet address to your account. Only do this if you are certain that you have no plans of changing your wallet, because it cannot be undone without an admin. This is a security protection, which would ensure that if your account always paid to your wallet regardless of if someone gained access to it (say you left your computer on at a coffee shop and came back). In the future, we will add a two-factor authentication which allows you to unlock this using an secondary authorization.
4. Lost Mining Pool Username or Passwords
If you lost your password to the mining pool website, use the login button on the
www.cloudhashing.com website to regain access to your mining pool account. We will be adding a lost username, lost password and reset password feature to the pooling website next week. For now, use the login button and this should allow for you to login to your account.
5. Contracts not showing up
Some clients told us their contracts that did not appear to be hashing. In almost all cases, this was caused by one of two bugs we found in our system. One was an early contract expiration bug that caused a few of the contracts to expire prematurely. Another was a bug for newer contract holders that only affected 15 customers who could not see their contracts on the front end. Both of these were resolved. Contracts purchased through cloudhashing.com now show up in the mining pool within 30 minutes of being purchased unless they are pending order approval.
We also added a feature that allows you to quickly reference your order numbers on the shopping cart order history with the order numbers associated with contracts on the mining pool. This will make it easier to verify that all of your contracts are showing up correctly!
5. Missing Payment on November 5th
We simply didn't find a block on November 5th for whatever reason, it was an unlucky day. We did however find 10 blocks on another day, so it does seem to balance out!
6. Missing payments October 29-Nov 4th
For customers who experienced the missing payments on their contracts between Oct. 29-Nov. 4th this was due to a bug with the expiration date on the contracts causing the contracts to expire unintentionally on Oct. 29th. This was discovered as a bug on November 4th and corrected on November 5th. This issue only occurred for some of our customers and we are reconciling their earning that went missing. Cloud Hashing will restore the earnings for those contracts that were affected by Thursday November 14th. We apologize for those who were affected by this bug and appreciate your patience as we restore your account.
7. Blank Login Screen
Any other users who were experiencing a blank page when trying to log into the mining pool should find that issue to be completely resolved. This was caused by a development server conflicting with the production server. We've seperated them to completely different facilities and this problem should hopefully be one for the history books.
Users with login problems should contact us.
8. Your Mining Pool Dashboard
The mining pool dashboard is a bit of a mystery tool box at the moment, and we apologize for the lack of tool tips on what all the information there is for. If you purchased a contract from Cloud Hashing, it automatically appears there and is shown as a contract with your purchased hash rate. On the mining pool dashboard you may see various features regarding miner names and difficulties. These features are for external mining hardware users that allow them to set the minimum difficulties for their hardware which is another way of saying the work that the mining pool sends their hardware to solve has varying degrees of complexity. Very powerful hardware requires more complex work to run at optimum efficiency. We will provide a tutorial for mining with external hardware after all major customer support issues are handled.
For the curios and technical buffs, the "Miners" and "Create Miner" sections are specifically for people who own hardware that want to connect their hardware to the Cloud Hashing pool. We have not officially launched the pool to the general public, so we figured we'd avoid going into too much detail about this. For those of you who do own hardware and want to beta test this a bit, you can create a "Miner" and connect your cgminer stratum software to pool.cloudhashing.com:3333 with your accountname_minername
9. Hardware Miners on the Pool Dashboard
Currently there is not an option to delete a miner on the dashboard, but in the near future there will be an option to hide miners from plain sight. Deleting them would remove useful data from our ledger and logs, so we are keeping them for now. In the near future this site will be far more customizable.
10. Combining and Upgrading Contracts
Currently there is no plans to allow for combining or upgrading contracts. The evolution of contracts as we have spoken about for quite some time is the Revenue Reinvestment Program.
11. Ledger Entries
For clients not seeing full details in their ledger entries on the Mining Pool, the software has up until recently been run manually and was not always run daily until about a week ago (keep in mind the pool only launched a few weeks back). This manual process has been done to validate all earnings are correct, since we value your payouts being accurate. This helped us discover the issue on Nov 4th with experations that is being resolved as mentioned earlier. Ledger entries now reflect all earnings as they occur on the pool in real time.
In some cases a ledger entry may appear missing but was actually consolidated into the ledger entries that occur on the day that is was run. In some cases as mentioned previously, some accounts experienced the expiration bug but most accounts have not had this issue. In the future ledger entries update when the pool finds a new bitcoin block.
12. Pending Contracts and what they mean
Pending contracts on the cloudhashing.com profile page typically mean some form of payment processing delay or error has occured. If your order remains pending for more than 72 hours please contact us immediately with the order number, cloudhashing.com username and date of purchase.
12. Earning decline in contracts over time
For users asking about decline in earning from a contract over time there are many factors involved in bitcoin mining. With the greatest effect on diminishing returns to be the growth of the entire bitcoin network hashing rate. Another factor is the huge amount of variance between mining pools, since in many ways Bitcoin mining is random and a large degree fo luck is involved. The more amount of mining equipment on a pool, the less the variance in luck becomes a factor, but it is always a factor. As many will notice, our pool hash rate has increased recently. We have yet to publicly invite hardware miners to our pool, so we have a large amount of hashing power by the standards of a single public company with their own mining pool.
In regards to helping customers with diminishing revenues on their contracts, Cloud Hashing is developing ongoing long term strategy to support its customers to mitigate the effects of diminishing returns as much as possible through programs like RRP.
13. Savings on contracts continues for one more week!
As a service to our customers and in light of a few bugs that we had to fix recently, all cloudhashing customers can continue to use the coupon code iluvcoinz during checkout to recieve the 50% discount on hashing power we've been offering. This offer is available for an additional 7 days and the offer ends on 18th of November 2013. Happy hashing!!!
Cloud Hashing Mining Pool Login
To access the mining pool, log onto your Cloud Hashing account here
https://www.cloudhashing.com/account then scroll until you see the login button.
If you already have your mining pool login details then please visit
http://pool.cloudhashing.comNote: It is important that you verify your wallet address details are correct. Payments will be processed automatically daily.
Your Cloud Hashing Partners
